Personal Life, Health, and Charity Work
Kill is close friends with Gary Patterson, currently the head football coach at Texas Christian University. Both men played football for Dennis Franchione and each worked for him as an assistant coach. Kill served as the best man in Patterson's wedding.
Kill suffered a series of seizures, including one on the sidelines in the waning seconds of a home loss to Illinois State on October 15, 2005. Subsequently, Kill was diagnosed with kidney cancer, which is now in remission. Kill has since started the Coach Kill Cancer Fund foundation to assist low-income southern Illinois residents with treatment.
On September 11, 2010, Kill was hospitalized for dehydration hours after a 23–17 win over North Dakota. One year later, on September 10, 2011, Kill was rushed to the hospital after suffering yet another seizure and collapsing on the sidelines, this time during the final seconds of Minnesota's loss to New Mexico State. On September 25, 2011, Kill was admitted to the Mayo Clinic after suffering another seizure. On October 13, 2012, he suffered a minor seizure after a Minnesota-Northwestern game and was released the following day. Kill missed the entire 2nd half of the final game of the regular season vs. Michigan State on November 24 due to suffering another seizure at halftime.
Kill was a nominee for the 2011 Uplifting Athletes Rare Disease Champion Award, presented by Uplifting Athletes, but lost to Princeton running back Jordan Culbreath.
Read more about this topic: Jerry Kill
Famous quotes containing the words personal, charity and/or work:
“It has no share in the leadership of thought: it does not even reflect its current. It does not create beauty: it apes fashion. It does not produce personal skill: our actors and actresses, with the exception of a few persons with natural gifts and graces, mostly miscultivated or half-cultivated, are simply the middle-class section of the residuum.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Hard work. Well, that’s all right for people who don’t know how to do anything else. It’s all right for people who aren’t lucky. But once you’re lucky, you don’t have to work for other people. You make them work for you.”
—Dan Totheroh (1895–1976)